Just jotting down a lot of things that I thought about during my walk today after I saw a pretty girl:
- I feel sexually attracted to some people. That's a Fact about what I physically feel. If I'm in a monogamous relationship, I have to either lie about feeling sexually attracted to anyone else, or admit the attraction but commit to not acting on it.
- The former is bad: I'm lying about something that's True.
- The latter doesn't feel right either because the reason seems hollow. Why shouldn't I act on the attraction? "Because sex is a purely romantic thing and having sex with someone else means I don't value my current partner romantically, or not as much as if I only wanted to have sex with her?" Why should sex be purely romantic? Why can't I be entirely devoted to someone and still act on my evolutionarily-ingrained desire to have sex with an attractive person? And it doesn't feel right that sex should be mostly romantic either: does more sex mean there's more romance? That's not right... And what the hell even is romance? I care mostly about a very deep connection and care for the other person in a relationship. That can happen with zero sex.
- I also feel like this desire to monogamy stems from anxiety of being cuckolded. Like that's so terrible so let's promise to not let that happen so we can be entirely devoted. But DNA tests now exist! The cuckold thing is mostly about how other people will see you; not that you're (consciously) personally horrified at the prospect of raising someone else's child.
- And also at least some part of sex is a physical thing. Your body wants to have sex because otherwise it wouldn't exist. Not having to hide that would feel much better than hiding it.
- I feel like it sounds like I'm saying "monogamy is hard so I don't want to do it." Not really; some hard things are worth doing. It's more that I think monogamy is antithetical to the values I want from a relationship.